Literature Remix
-
" Here it comes", by Mariana Isara
Here it comes was a runner up in the Literature Remix category sponsored by New Zealand Post
I hope that my piece does justice to its literary sources and works on its own as a unique and cohesive poem.http://typewhatyousee.blogspot.com/2011/09/here-it-comes.html
-
"a voice that’s not the same as hers", by Maria McMillan
I mashed three poems to create a new poem. Each of these poems seemed to me to work through a tension between the nostalgic and the sinister. Each recounted realities and memories so intense they become surreal. And each poem brought into being an entire believable world, with a distinct atmosphere and architectue and time zone. I hoped, in my mash up, to create a fourth new world. A what if world. A shared landscape. Direct link to work:a voice that’s not the same as hers
Selected judges' comments
"This feels also like a unitary poem, but with bigger logic and tone leaps than the others. The mixer has identified a common mood in the three sources, and some crossover imagery, and has crafted a poem that is less overtly a traditional lyric than those, and allows a greater feeling of discontinuity."
-
"at the top or at the end of the world", by Fiona Shaw
This piece is a remix of three works (the ANZAC Centenary Bridge, This is about earthquakes, and She used to ask me, what is it like up there?). I wanted to take the key elements that the three pieces shared (first person, a discussion of destruction and endings, and, to some extent, the perspectives of children) and combine them together into a new piece. I was particularly interested in the child's perspective of tragic events. This piece puts a different spin on the ideas in the original pieces, as well as using elements from them that I found particularly striking.
-
"Baby Steps", by Hilary Crombie
I tried to combine different source materials in a way that was playful and unexpected, but still felt unified and coherent overall.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AFcHqaZG6Jg2aNtoITTXAw6LU8cbZIB_xc_4AY22rdY/edit?hl=en_US
-
"Crossed Cultures", by Allan Xia
Crossed Cultures won the Literature Remix category sponsored by New Zealand Post
For this piece I wished to explore poetry in a visual context. By remixing Renee Liang's 'Crossed Cultures' with Dylan Horrock's 'Siso' I attempted to create a continuously flowing piece of graphic novel in the style, pacing and format of the original poem. Through this reinterpretation, the reader can experience the poem in an totally brand new context. Dylan Horrocks' simple yet profoundly engaging drawings connects perfectly with the child-like self reflective voice in 'Crossed Cultures'. I used as many original panels from 'Siso' as I could, as I believed the feeling of innocence entwined with a sense of bitter aftertaste translated very well into the context of Renee Liang's poem. I connected these images through drawings of my own while retaining a coherent look and style. The reason why I chose to explore the poem 'Crossed Cultures' in a new context was because the themes and messages resonated with me very deeply. I moved to New Zealand with my parents when I was 8 years old from China. When we first arrived our family would move around very often, in the first three years I had enrolled in 8 primary schools. The poem reminded me of many childhood memories and feelings of alienation and isolation. As a visual artist who has an deep interest in comics, I wished to explore these themes through a sequential narrative. However, I did not want panels to break the pace and flow of the poem, this is why I chose to use a long continuous format so the reader can follow the piece just as they follow the original poem. Something else I wanted to explore was the idea of remixing. Much like remixing two songs together, I wanted to experiment between analog/traditional vs digital. Through Photoshop, I tried to emulate the traditional look of Dylan Horrock's pen work, creating a new piece of artwork using 'Siso' as the foundation. Lastly, my favourite part of this new interpretation of "Crossed Cultures" is the addition of Chinese to the dialogue asked by "others from [the narrator's] own country". By chance, the question "how does it feel to be you?" also happened to work exactly opposite in Chinese grammatically, so I was able to play around with the idea of western comics and eastern manga having opposite reading directions. Link to image with the CC Licence here: http://paperasylum.blogspot.com/2011/09/literature-remix.htmlhttp://dl.dropbox.com/u/619203/Crossed%20Cultures%20Lit%20Remix%20Final_Allan%20Xia.jpg
-
"Domus – home, dwelling", by Kate Waterhouse
This sequence of ten poems is an intentional remix of words and lines from the ten poems or prose poems listed in the literature section of the mix & mash site. As a start point I set the poems in alphabetical order by surname of the poet (see below). First was Pip Adam’s piece The Anzac Centenary Bridge, very near where I lived for 10 years in Sydney, with its eerie “bird at the end of the world”. Last was Ian Wedde’s Shadow Stands Up – a work in progress and a brilliant line. Taking Australian poet John Tranter's technique of making poems from the first and last words of the lines of poets he admires, I kept the pieces in this order and began reducing 2136 words to 662. The two key bird and shadow lines appear in both the first and last stanzas. I heard Tranter speak on his poetics in Melbourne in July– an early poem was his response to A. D. Hope’s poem Australia, in which Hope “got stuck into the country and its position at the end of the world: ''She is the last of lands, the emptiest/A woman beyond her change of life, a breast/Still tender but within the womb is dry.'' (The Age, Aug 27, 2011). Tranter also says since that angry response to Hope in 1963 ''I have been taking other artworks and demolishing them … rebuilding them and commenting on them and using bits of them to critique them... I had the idea to rewrite (Clepsydra by John Ashbery) as though I'd written it myself but I wanted to keep Ashbery in it so I took the first and last word of each line and kept that from his poem.'' He likens the meaning of poetry to that of a dream. “…you wake up thinking, 'That's so important' but the dream is so obscure that you have no idea what it means.'' Tranter is huge in Australian poetry and while ground breaking in many respects, his portrayals of women and society are not always so. While not the reason for making the sequence, I enjoyed applying his technique to material he probably wouldn't like to produce work he probably wouldn't like, to describe another country, also at the end of the world. This "found" poem is a dark view of the future and our world - our domus - and the lives of children in the country in which we dwell. It is a country where humanity and responsibility have been abandoned by some, leaving us with no escape from social and ecological decay. Yet it is a weirdly beautiful and compelling place of natural wonder and human failing, of light and shadow, birds and water and the things between. Some stanzas emerged easily from the source work - generally the better the source poem, the less work was required to edit an “emerged” poem out. There is resonance between several of the works which contributes to their connectedness and the dreamlike flow of the sequence’s narrative. Images pour out of this piece and if I had more time I would add photographs to it. The works used (in order of use) are: The Anzac Centenary Bridge - Pip Adam Self-portrait at fifteen - Hinemoana Baker Don’t Lean Away - Emma Barnes East of the river - Airini Beautrais Sastrugi, Antarctica - Bernadette Hall On getting away - Helen Heath She used to ask me, what is it like up there? - Lynn Jenner Crossed Cultures - Renee Liang Tincture - Helen Lehndorf Shadow Stands Up - Ian Wedde
-
"End of Time ", by Carys Goodwin
My poem is a piece that uses a mixture of lines from the licensed pieces and lines that are my own. Inspired by the first line, "I used to dream of the very middle", it is a piece about a dream and is an allegory for passing between worlds. It is heavily influenced by the mythology of various cultures, and is an exploration into the point when one reaches the eternal afterlife. The piece is rich and imagery, much of which is borrowed from the poems and stories of the list. I blended them together to create a vivid picture of the border between worlds, and the 'river' that is often mentioned in ancient texts. The lines I chose are ones that, when combined, have an almost 'dreamlike' quality, which is appropriate for the setting of the poem.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k-dn5l3YijH6XlAurwnPmKzaZKrUmHQYdTFdeWgyaSE/edit?hl=en_GB
-
"Here and There", by Bronwyn Elsmore
This entry uses content from eleven of the sixteen works from the “awesome lineup of New Zealand authors and their Creative Commons licensed works” on the Literature Remix site. On reading those entries I took from them what I believed to be the best lines and used them to inspire a new work that reflects several themes present, though often not developed, in many of the originals – reflection, yearning, change, and particularly the confidence of the New Zealand voice in its native surroundings. Some of the lines in my remix reflect emotions present in the original pieces, others have taken on quite different meanings in the new work. Thank you to the original writers for the inspiration!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cEFdbOBav53MMIJJtAQnK7sQBIzkHTs0c2dEVzaML34/edit?hl=en_GB
-
"Literature Mix & Mash Reloaded", by Tong Liu
It is unique and very cool! I chose seven New Zealand creative commons licensed pieces of literature, which are mixed and mashed with their characters running vertically and horizontally. Each work is represented in a different colour of the rainbow. The rainbow colours represent the mixing and matching of diverse pieces of literature to create something beautiful. To echo the attempts of Chinese to assimilate into the local community, the colour of the characters from “Crossed Cultures” fades from bright red into a paler colour. The details of the literary pieces will be displayed if the text is clicked. It is perfect for the entry page of Literature Mix & Mash! Microsoft Silverlight web browser plug-in needed to view my art work (the web page). The web hosting I am using is a free one. I recorded some of the activities of my site and published on You Tube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-Bq5cCv_7U ) just in case the free web hosting server gets very busy.
-
"Miss Hap", by Meg Torwl
Miss Hap is a 300 or so words prose poem using phrases, words and cartoons from all of the 16 writers works, offered for remix. An image associative meditation on childhood, escape through art, literature and moving to Auckland (!) many may be able to relate to. ( :
http://integrialmedia.blogspot.com/2011/09/miss-hap-mashup-prose-poem.html
-
"Sharks", by Sarah Jane Barnett
Sharks was a runner up in the Literature Remix category sponsored by New Zealand Post
I've brought two pieces of writing together (Helen Heath's "On Getting Away", and Pip Adam's "The ANZAC Centenary Bridge), that feature animals, and interpreted / remixed them to create a poem that talks about human relationships. I've tried to reuse their language in different ways to the original context, in order to show how amazing and flexible language can be. For example in Adam's piece she talks about the cantilever of a bridge, and I have instead used the word to suggest my speaker's tiredness. My entry is a completely new and original piece, that I think people will like. This is gosh darn awesome. -
"The Garden of O", by Bill Nelson
The Garden of O was a runner up in the Literature Remix category sponsored by New Zealand Post
This is an original artwork that takes the fabric of NZ and international poets and combines them into something new and unique. Like a quilt your mum made, it's partially you and it's partially her and it's partially off the backs of people who wore the old t-shirts she made it out of. But ultimately I really couldn't tell why it works, because that depends on the reader, so I'd suggest you go read it and decide for yourself. There's not 'source code' or users manual with poetry. It's pretty simple you either like it or you don't. It either makes you think or feel something or it doesn't. No explanation can help you with that. Good luck. -
"The Mountain", by Hera Lindsay Bird
The Mountain was a runner up in the Literature Remix category sponsored by New Zealand Post
This is a remix of Lynn Jenner's "She used to ask me what is it like up there?" and Cheryl Bernstein's "This is about earthquakes." I guess the first link is that my poem is about both natural disasters and mountains. It follows on from the part in Lynn Jenner's poem that goes, "It would be stupid to say that the mountains bear us any ill will; as stupid as it would be to say that we belong there." I wanted to expand on Lynn Jenner's ideas about our relationship to nature, and the way we always seem to need to personify land-forms and natural disaster. But there's something kind of similar about Lynn Jenner's poem and Cheryl Bernstein's daughter's story about earthquakes. The short, factual sentences and the simple repetitions make them both occasionally sound like they've come from some weird, magical text book. I tried to stitch the two pieces together by playing with the idea of repetition and the short, frightening statements that Cheryl Bernstein's daughter uses. "Eggs fall down. Houses fall down." I wanted this poem to sound like some kind of scientific guidebook gone wrong. -
"This is about earthquakes", by Brooke Phelan
I would like to think my take on the story "This is about earthquakes" on Cheryl Bernstein's biography blog, is an innocent, child-like view of the earthquakes in Christchurch. The inspiration came purely from the way her child was expressing themselves and what was going through her mind. My idea of using the rabbits came from this and also an image on the common's photo-stream on Flikr where there was a house for Guiney-pigs. The randomness of it also related to how the story was written (in short sentences) and no real meaning other than the facts. Hopefully my adaptation has improved the child's story in the way of being appealing to younger audiences going through the same experiences. It may also open children's' minds to the idea that everyone has been effected by the events, even animals, and that it can help to talk and share the similar experiences. I chose this short poem as it has been such an event in New Zealand's history and it was quite sad to hear those thoughts fro someone so young who shouldn't have to experience something so life-changing. I didn't really want to change the words in any way as they were so simple and honest, I didn't want to change that. I did incorporate the image "Dream" by Emily Perkins as it also showed that simplistic theme and the title really did feel like it suited the text.
http://kete.digitalnz.org/site/search/documents/for/earthquakes?search_terms=earthquakes
-
"Untitled (This is about earthquakes)", by Megan Clayton
A mash-up of the words of my esteemed fellow-essayists and -poets Cheryl Bernstein, Emma Barnes and Helen Heath, to create a poem about the Canterbury Earthquakes. Mental, emotional and seismic pressures alike combine to buckle and blend the authors' words into something new.
Selected judges' comments
"Megan Clayton's meditation on the earthquakes, topical, but also quite haunting, an evocation of the emotions provoked by the disaster, and a clever/deft combining of the sources."
